WHY I QUIT READING THE NY TIMES.

 WHY I STOPPED READING THE TIMES. 

HOW THE NYT ABANDONED NEWS AND JOURNALISM TO BECOME A BASE PRODUCT-FOR- SALE-ONLY 

IT IS PURPOSELY TAILORED TO A SPECIFIC CLIENTELE— A SMALL MINORITY OF OUR NATION’S READERS. 

In 1961 I graduated from college and somehow landed a great summer job with the illusriousn NYT.  In those days the paper was known as the “great gray lady” (no color adds and no comic strips) .  It was the prestige organ of journalism.  It was tasked with creating an historic record of the times.  All the great jurnos, want to be writers and commentators either worked there or wanted to.  It sold millions of copies and was published around the world. 

But that was before the great “electronic tech” revolution. In this as days almost  every literate person (or wanna be) had the times delivered to his or her office or home where one could comfortably open the paper over hot breakfast with the famous broad sheet flopping over  a steaming hot cup of coffee and its corners occasionally becoming fat stained in the near-by buttered bagel.  The bulky, hard to manage “big sheet” required gloves ( to protect one from ink stains) and an extensive knowledge of origami to be able to effectively fold the sheets and read and manage the parts you were interested in.  .    

Today the coffee and buttered bagel might be there, but there is no paper.  The reader would be staring at a small rectangle of blinking light displaying  “apps” that provide access to all forms of news information in several languages and from distant places around the world.  

The days of  “newsprint” —-that crinkly, foldable, hand staining, good for packing glassware, excellent fire starter, often spread as a table covering to serve Maryland Crab dinners and used as a surface to clean a mess of fresh caught fish—that type of newspaper —-was completely over.   

In the latter part of the last century the NYT owners were terrified, How would the near 150 year old newspaper survive in the face of falling circulation numbers?  It acted as a news source for tens of millions in the 1980s and 90s.  It informed the entire nation.  In those days it’s  profits came from selling advertisement  space in its papers.   Vast columns of “houses for sale”, big two page spreads of advert for clothes, cars and all the products a nation’a businesses sells might appear in the Times. That circulation meant that the Times could demand big sums for a full page ad. .  It made it’s profits from sale of advertisements.  The greater it’s circulation the more people of varying economic and social positions it reached the better, for it could charge more for its advert space. .  It’s news and opinion  sections were published for the benefit of a wide diverse, often national readership.  The publisher’s goal was to attract the broadest possible spectrum of readership and this correlated with their profits from of advertisement space in the paper. 

But what happens if you can no longer sell copies?  What happens when circulation shrinks by 10 to 25% as it did in the 1990s.  How can a business  survive when sales of copies drops from tens of millions to a few hundred thousand copies and advertising revenue disappears accordingly? . The answer is that  news organizations dependent on advertising sales—  folded like so many others  around the nation and disappeared. The old paradigm of great informative and “free news” paid for by advertising space in a widely circulated journal  was over. 

To survive the Times’ owners had to devise a new business plan. They settled on selling  subscriptions to a small subset of its readers. But why should these subscribers PURCHASE the Times when they could access a wide variety of information sources via internet right on their little iPhone screens and   all for free.  The Times needed to change its news and opinion philosophy from “all the news that’s fit to print” to:  only the news that pleases the subscribers. 

To inveigle this small subset of readers into becoming subscribers the Times had to TAILOR its news and opinion to attract and hold them.  The Times—is no longer the “great grey lady” the newspaper of record, the paper that publishes what actually is happening ( or as close to that goal as anyone can reasonably accomplish) but it is now a boutique publication catering to the interest, biases and preconceived notions of a small clientele—mostly of the far left, often elites of urban centers, comprising radical feminists, pro-abortionists,  socialists, the “woke” generation, BLM movement, and the LBTQ xyz so called community and other of the fringe left.   

These groups subscribe to the Times. They pay for the news they prefer to read and the Times news and opinion pages accommodate  them.  To remain in business the Times must keep these folks pleased with the “news” the paper chooses to print and the .”storyline” they prefer to read.    (The NY T recently claims about  7 million subscribers.  Those 7 million subscribers are apparently enough to keep the Times afloat and generate a profit.  

But this number is only  a fraction of its pre-1990s readership.  Today the Times reaches only perhaps 2 to 4 % of the voting public.  Thus more than 95% of voters do not read the Times or care to read its electronic pages. It can no longer boast it is the “newspaper of record”. It is now a  “niche publication”, as in ecology where that word means an organism adapted to a specific and specialized environment.  

The Times no longer provides  “news”  for those who need to be, or simply want to be informed. This is no longer the kind of real journalism that democracies  depend on  to help generate  informed citizenry, who vote based on established facts .  No!   The NYT’s “survival  business plan” is generating a product —like any commercial institution—its product is generated, modified and modulated expressly for the likes and dislikes of its subscribers and for purposes of continued robust sales. 

Yes, the President was correct.. it’s “fake”.   It is not real news. 

Use it if you like it. Leave it on the shelf if you don’t. .